Through work on a pet project I’m getting quite a crash course on making a web app with guidance from my friends Jay and Steve.

Jay has rightly pushed version control upon us so we can start working like real programmers. I pushed back for a bit, not really understanding what the deal was.

It took some digging, but I finally found two great guides to version control.

This “Better Explained” guide by Kalid Azad is a perfect high-level abstract overview of version control and why it’s necessary, especially when working with others on a project. I Googled for about 30 minutes one day while going crazy trying to learn version control. This page is the best by far.

This guide is a nice literal, code based followup if you’re going to use Subversion.